


Stone, Paper, Scissors

by quietasasleepingarmy



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: First Time, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Smut, Insane Wish FulFillment, M/M, Necessary Conversations, Proposals, Reichenfeels, Summer storms, declarations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-17
Updated: 2016-08-17
Packaged: 2018-08-09 08:31:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7794781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietasasleepingarmy/pseuds/quietasasleepingarmy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John visits Sherlock during a summer storm.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stone, Paper, Scissors

**Author's Note:**

> Minimally edited, not Brit-picked fluff (with a slight edge of angst). I've wanted to write a fic inspired by [Candlelit by Frightened Rabbit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUOA6TyhS1Ml) since I first watched Sherlock, and I finally have. :)
> 
>  
> 
> **There are mentions of alcohol and drug abuse.**
> 
>  
> 
> Thank you, always, to [fleetwood_mouse](http://archiveofourown.org/users/fleetwood_mouse/pseuds/fleetwood_mouse) .

 

 

 

Light floods the room and retreats, as if someone were clicking the lights on and off.

Anticipating the corresponding crack of thunder doesn’t make him flinch any less when it comes.

It’s five p.m., but it could be any time. It’s dark as night outside. His feet are cold where they poke through the sheets.

The close, thick air of a summer storm always makes him crave coffee. Or cocaine. A dose of sharpness to cut through the charged humidity. He paid off every dealer he knows weeks ago, and the rain will make finding others exhausting. Not quite worth the work. Definitely not worth the disappointment his brother wears like an especially austere widow’s veil. Or the quiet despair creased into John’s face.

Coffee is so far away, and so insistent on being separate components. There’s no one here other than him to do the chemistry: combine, add heat, transport from vessel to vessel. Mrs. Hudson, who seems especially itchy for company during storms, is on holiday in Italy with Mr. Chatterjee.

The need for something to crispen the colours and lines of this grey blur of a flat, of a city, of a world manifests as an itch along his spine, then in the crook of his elbow, then the back of his hand.

“Enough,” he rasps. “Enough!”

The next splintered flash of light propels him from his tangle of sheets like an undead thing; he stumbles blind through the hallway, hands outstretched to catch his balance against the wall.

He stands still as he waits for the thunder, and keeps his eyes closed when it hits.

But it doesn’t end, somehow; a heavy noise continues after the telltale rumble has receded. Heavy—banging? Knock-knocking? Someone at the door?

His brain is a sludgepit without the stimulants he’s promised it, but he’s aware enough to deduce that if someone is knocking at the door of his flat, that means that they got through the front door without much trouble. Who would bother knocking, if they’d managed to break in? Surely Mrs. Hudson would have locked the door when she left, what, two days ago, three? So, most likely: the person at the door has a key. Has a key and knows he’s home. Could only be Billy or Mycroft (who wouldn’t bother knocking) or—

“Sherlock, you in there? C’mon, I’m drenched.”

John. John, who’s been missing for weeks. Is it weeks? Seemed like weeks yesterday, when Sherlock last bemoaned the lack of someone else about with the required faculties and motor control to make coffee. Not missing, as a matter of fact, but at home at his nice (in a dreary, predictable sort of way) flat with his not always so nice wife and his baby, whose general temperament remains to be seen. Sherlock has only seen her twice, in the six weeks since she was born. Ah, see, he was right. It has been weeks since he saw John. Two and three days, in fact. So why is he here, now, in the midst of a storm?

“Sherlock, I know you’re there. I can hear you stumbling about. Are you high?”

For God’s—

“John.”

John’s eyebrows attempt to meet his hairline when he looks up at Sherlock, as if he expected to be wrong. As if someone else might be crashing through the hallway of 221B on a Tuesday afternoon. He’s always had trouble trusting the narrative of his own senses—one of the biggest impediments to what might otherwise be adequate deduction skills.

He is, indeed, soaked, having come from the surgery after an anxious walk through Regent’s Park and then a stop off at. . .an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting? Oh, John.

He ducks his head as he’s always done when he knows that Sherlock has deduced something he’d rather he hadn’t. “Hey. Can I come in?”

“Yes.”

When Sherlock fails to remove himself from the doorway, caught up in the splash pattern of the cheap coffee that John half-heartedly tried to rub out of his shirt at some point, John gently grips his shoulders and moves him as if he were a second door to pass through. The heat from his hands lingers on Sherlock’s skin as John shuffles into the kitchen.

“Got anything in? Not food, but I dunno. Tea?”

“Coffee.”

Sherlock closes the door and draws his arms around himself. He wishes rather desperately he’d thought to find a dressing gown before answering the door. His worn t-shirt and pajamas feel too thin, too close to his bare, marked skin.

John sticks his head out of the kitchen, his brow set in its appealing concentric half circle of creases.

“Is that because of the. . .” He gestures toward the spill on his shirt.

“No. I just want it.”

“Ah. Well, I did too, before a massive bloke bumped into me without so much as a by your leave. Whatever you’ve got probably tastes better than that swill, too.”

Sherlock can’t quite help the smile that threatens his lips. He finds a dressing gown draped across his chair, and, newly armored, leans in the kitchen doorway to watch John methodically measure beans into the grinder.

“It wasn’t a massive bloke. It was a woman. A pretty one who flirted with you until she saw your ring and squeezed past.”

John grinds the beans and loads them into Sherlock’s French press, before settling into to keenly observe the kettle. His hands curve against the counter so that he can lean against it. He purses his lips and dips his chin in silent acknowledgment of the exposed lie, and Sherlock has missed him so, so much. The sight of him in what used to be their kitchen threatens to overwhelm him with unanswereds and unknowns.

“Why did you come here, John?”

“Well, I was in the neighborhood, wasn’t I? I wasn’t going to trouble you, but then the rain happened, and—“

The lights stutter and buzz so abruptly that Sherlock fears he might be having one of the strokes the internet has promised are the due of all intravenous cocaine addicts. There’s a loud pop, and then the flat is completely dark, illuminated only by occasional spasms of lightning.

“Oh.”

“Shite.” Sherlock can’t see John in the dark, but he can hear him rummage through the cupboard for two mugs. They hit the counter with a satisfying clink, and the sound of water hitting fresh-ground coffee is almost as delicious as the warm, roasty scent that follows.

“C’mon. There’s still a bit of daylight left in the sitting room, beyond that wall of clouds. You still have those candles from the Stephenson case?”

 

 

Within a few moments, with very little help from Sherlock, they are sitting in their chairs, surrounded by several lit beeswax candles, cradling cups of coffee in their hands as the storm blusters on.

“You all right?” John asks when Sherlock can’t contain his flinch at an especially apocalyptic crack of thunder.

“Perfectly.” He takes a sip of the coffee—heavenly, as John’s coffee always is, with the exact right amount of sugar somehow located and added in the dark—and narrows his eyes at the John-shaped outline across from him. The candlelight softens his edges and the lines of his face, so that he is woundingly beautiful, electric and sure beneath his tired costume of a harried husband and father. “Are you?”

John sighs, and takes a sip from his own mug. “You mean, about the meeting.”

“To start.”

“I wanted. . .I’ve had quite a few patients come to me for help with addiction, recently. Mostly alcohol. Some pills. I know Harry hates AA, calls them a bunch of God-obsessed zombies, but it’s really worked for a few of the chaps I was deployed with. So I went.” He shrugs. His shoulders are outlined sharply by the high contrast of the room, and Sherlock wants to touch them, to find out by feel where they hold the most tension, and what it would take to smooth it out.

“And what did you learn?”

“Seems like a nice group. Bit like any other support group I’ve been to. I can see how it helps people.”

“Do you think it might help you?”

John shakes his head and laughs. Sherlock winces at the bitterness in it. “I’m not an alcoholic. I’ve made sure of that.” He meets Sherlock’s eyes. “But I s’pose we can all use a bit of help sometimes.”

Sherlock looks down at the black pool of his coffee. It’s gone a bit lukewarm.

“Sherlock. I’m sorry I asked if you were high. I know you’ve been clean these past few months.” He presses when Sherlock doesn’t look at him. “Right?”

“Yes. It’s all right, though, that you asked. I did think about it today.”

John makes a pained noise. “You could have called.”

Sherlock smiles faintly. “Didn’t have to. Here you are.”

“Here I am.”

“I’m glad. Sorry about the, you know.” He waves at the rapidly increasing darkness.

“Don’t tell me you’re so arrogant that you think you control the power lines.”

Sherlock shrugs, and John’s responding giggle sparks a low chuckle in him, as well. It feels so piercingly good to laugh with him like that. At the moment, he can’t begin to imagine how long it’s been. But it feels better than any dose could ever hope to.

“You wouldn’t have been troubling me, you know.”

“Mm?”

“Earlier, before the power went out, you were saying that you didn’t want to trouble me. You’re never any trouble. I mean, I. . .I’m always glad to see you.”

“Oh, right. Thanks. Really.”

John sets his mug on the side table, next to a useless lamp and three lit candles. The smell of the beeswax has met the lingering scents of coffee and rain, and Sherlock thinks he hasn’t felt this safe since before he fell.

“Sherlock. . .”  
Sherlock stiffens, and sets down his mug, too. He knows that tone. John is going to tell him why he’s really here on a week night during a summer storm, and he’s not sure which emotions he’ll be forced to conjure or suppress. So much for the calm. For the warmth of the damp air.

“Mary’s leaving me.”

Sherlock’s mouth falls open without his permission. “ _She’s_ leaving _you_?”

He grips the sides of his chair to keep from flying into a manic session of pacing and hand wringing. Shock glaciates his vocal cords, and his voice is hoarse, strange to his own ears. “She’s? Why? Why now? Why ever? How ever?”

“Ssh. It’s okay.” John’s hands blur in the candlelight as they reach out to quiet him without quite reaching him. Sherlock realises he may have shouted his last languageless utterances. “It’s for the best. Mutual. We’ve discussed it at length. All the stuff with Magnussen and then Moriarty—a lot of loose ends have started to crop up. Old scores and contracts that weren’t as settled as she thought. Or that were never settled. She needs to relocate, quickly and permanently. And I won’t be going with her.”

Sherlock feels a bit faint, but relinquishes his death grip on the chair. “The baby?”

“Stays with me, for now. We’re going to work out visitation if and when it becomes safe enough.”

“But. . .you won’t be joining her? If and when it becomes safe enough?”

John looks at Sherlock for a long time before answering. Sherlock tries and fails to halt the incessant tapping of his fingers and toes.

“No,” John says after untold moments of agonized silence. “I won’t be joining her.”

Sherlock feels all his breath travel up his feet and down his arms and evacuate at once from his lungs. He is grateful for the dark—for the slight cover provided for his treacherous, twitching, horribly gleeful face.

“I see.”

John sighs. “Yeah.” His hands are folded in front of him, and he taps the bridge of them against the tops of his thighs once, twice. “Listen. I’ve—we’ve—Mary and I—have been talking about this for awhile. Since before you last came over, actually.”

“Oh.” How could they possibly? How did he miss it? Sure, the baby was distracting, with her soft hands and various smells and the unmistakeable shape of John’s nose in miniature on her little face, but how could he have missed this.

He closes his eyes. Mary was herself: steely and bright and a bit frightening beneath the cherry red cardigan, the brush of flour on her sleeve. How wrong he was to have ever underestimated her. The stupidest thing he’s ever done in his life.

John was himself. Wasn’t he?

“I’m sorry that I didn’t tell you sooner. And that I showed up like this to do it.”

“No. No! It’s fine. If you’re fine. Are you. . .fine?”

John smiles, and Sherlock loves the flickering glint of his teeth.

“Yeah. I’m fine. More than.”

“Oh. That’s. . .good. Do you want to, um. . .” He makes a face, handling the idea on his tongue like it might leak poison if it caught on his teeth. “Talk? Don’t people typically like to talk about it when things like this happen?”

John’s smile widens, and Sherlock almost has to close his eyes against its light.

“Sure. But there’s not much to say. I’ve never really forgiven her for shooting you. I thought you knew that.”

“I. . .”

“It’s okay. I know you didn’t want to say. I appreciate it, Sherlock, really I do. That you let me come to my own terms, in my own time. You wouldn’t have done that a few years ago. You’’d have ruined everything with Mary from the start, and maybe I’d have let you. But I’d have resented you for it, even more than I already did.”

Sherlock does close his eyes, at that. “I failed you.”

“What?”

“I should have seen what she is. Who she is. It was all there, all in evidence, if I’d bothered to look.”

John shakes his head. “Hey. Mary is very, very good at hiding. I’d know better than anyone, right?”

Sherlock pulls at two handfuls of curls. “But I should have seen. I should have known. That’s what I’m for.”

Without warning, John is suddenly knelt on the floor, wincing in the candlelight from the pressure on his bad leg. He crouches between Sherlock’s long calves, but doesn’t touch him. His arms come to rest alongside Sherlock’s on the leather of the chair, and his face is close enough that Sherlock can feel his breath.

“You stopped yourself because you didn’t want to see anything that would stop me from marrying her. Because you wanted me to be happy. I see that now. It’s all been for me, hasn’t it? The wedding, Magnussen. Even. . .even the fall.” He lets out a shuddery breath that Sherlock feels against his exposed clavicle. He shivers. “I spoke to Molly after a few pints. She told me you had to fake your death because Moriarty had a sniper trained on me. Is it true?”

Sherlock’s eyes are wide. No amount of swallowing can remedy the dryness of his mouth. “And Mrs. Hudson. And Lestrade.”

“But me. Me who watched you plummet to your death on the pavement. Me who organized your funeral. You had to do that in order to protect me?”

Sherlock nods. A trail of salt slides down his cheeks and into his mouth, and everything feels strange, like it’s happening to someone else. Like he’s in one of the many dreams he’s had since he came back.

John makes a high, harsh sound, and he looks into Sherlock’s eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I. I wanted you to have what you wanted. A life.”

“You were my life. And as hard as I’ve tried, that’s never stopped being true.”

Sherlock looks down to watch John’s fingers interlacing with his, warm and steady against his trembling joints.

He can’t manage more than to whisper, “John.”

“You ruined me. You shattered me and there was never going to be any putting me back together, unless you somehow resurrected yourself. And you did that too. Twice. You came back to life on that operating table.” He inhales sharply; it looks like it hurts. “You could have had me at any point after you came back, but instead you helped me to move on from you. No one else has ever, ever come close to loving me that much.”

“Everything I did, I did to get back to you. As soon as I could. I thought of nothing else. Nothing.”

“I know.” John leans in. His whispered words are hot against Sherlock’s neck. “Am I wrong in thinking it wasn’t really so that I could be married to someone else?”

The focus from the caffeine has long been negated. He is drowning in the geometry that separates his lips from John’s; he is drowning in the familiar smell of clean cotton and warm spice, which he’s never had so much of, so up close. “I. . .”

“Will you just. Will you let me show you?”

“Show me. . .what?”

“That solving crimes and being clever isn’t what you’re for. Like you were some sort of surgical implement, and not the best man I’ve ever known.”

His next words fall syrup-thick from his mouth. “What am I for, then?”

“Me. No one else.” John’s voice is dark as the smoke from the candle that has gone out on the table. It spirals around Sherlock, floods his pores, twines around his curls.

“Oh.”

John presses his lips to Sherlock’s forehead. “Tell me you don’t feel the same way, and we’ll forget this ever happened.”

“John, oh.”

John kisses along his jaw, then hesitates when there’s a bare centimeter between their lips. “Please. You are the most beautiful thing I have ever, ever seen. Let me.”

Sherlock doesn’t jump when thunder sounds an assault from a trebuchet. He can feel John’s pulse against his own, hot and constant in their palms.

He nods, and John leans in.

At first, it’s a dry, electric peck. Sherlock’s eyes flutter open, and he sees himself reflected in John’s wide pupils.

He closes them again and surges forward. Suddenly he tastes coffee, and John has control of his tongue, his lips, his pounding heart. Small, steady hands have worked their way under his dressing gown and t-shirt, to hold him around the ribs and keep him from flying apart.

Noise swathes his mind, thoughts, grey matter: a gauzy static of rain against the windowpanes. The sensation pushing beneath his skin is, what is it? A chord. A chord on a violin that no one’s ever discovered until this moment, played with an ambrosial bow.

Under the gentle command of John’s mouth, he remembers his hands, and brings them round to splay across the small of John’s back—an area to which he has devoted hours of furtive, clandestine study. The skin there softer than he could have possibly imagined.

He’s hard, and somehow, under the protection of the candlelight and the sincerity of John’s sucking kisses against his throat, he doesn’t mind. He doesn’t worry when he brushes against John and finds him in a similar state. He doesn’t hold back his corresponding moan.

“Oh, God,” John pants. “Let’s keep you making that sound, yeah? Anything I can do.”

“Get on the floor.”

At John’s look of alarm, Sherlock rolls his eyes. “Your knee is killing you. It’s distracting.”

“Ah. So it is. Bedroom?”

“Too far. And dark.”

“Right.”

With a bit of maneuvering, they end up on the floor in front of the dormant fireplace, cupping each others’ jaws, sharing breath. Urgency is slowly replaced by careful exploration. John ducks his head and lifts his arms for Sherlock to pull his vest over his head. Candlelight streaks his skin with gold, like sunlight through water, and it’s so fitting, that.

John laughs when Sherlock presses his mouth to his collarbone, then buries his nose in the hair under his arm.

“How was that?”

“I’ve always wanted to do that. Mm.”

His laugh heats into a moan when Sherlock swirls a pointed tongue around his right nipple.

“Oh my God.”

Sherlock grins up at the candles in his eyes, the well-kissed flush of his lips. “Not quite.”

John’s face contorts, and for the first time tonight, Sherlock feels the cold brush of fear. There’s been no doubt in his oxytocin-drunk mind that he’ll ruin this eventually, if not tonight, if not this week, but what a way to do it—by reminding them of that not good thing he did, that egregious joke borne out of panic at the sight of John after two desolate years. . .

“C’mere.” John reaches out and holds his jaw, gently urging him forward. Sherlock is distantly aware that he is wincing when John kisses him with such forceful sweetness that his eyes roll back in his head. Hands are in his hair, hands that have killed for him, as his own fingers (desperately gripping and caressing John’s back, his good shoulder) have killed for John.

Lips sear a course along his neck, and the buttons of his shirt are cleverly dealt with. John keeps his palm between Sherlock’s shoulder blades as he slides the sleeves down pale shoulders, as if unwilling to let him go for even a second.

“Christ,” John says, drawing back, “you are extraordinary.”

Sherlock snorts unattractively before he can stop himself.

He turns in John’s loose embrace and waits for the expected sharp inhale.

When John speaks, his voice has the dangerous edge that makes him shiver despite the summer heat.

“Who did this to you.”

“They’re dead.” A lie, which he swore he’d never do to John again. Far better to let John believe that the matter has been resolved, though.

“Lucky for them.”

Sherlock turns and looks at him carefully, head pillowed on an extended arm. John keeps a hand hand pressed hot against the crux of his shoulder.

“I never wanted to leave.”

“I know. God, I. . .I know. It’s so good to know that. Now.”

“You didn’t before.”

“No. I didn’t know anything, Sherlock.”

“I’m sorry.” He closes his eyes. “So profoundly sorry.”

“Ssh.” John shifts on the carpet, and when Sherlock opens his eyes, it’s to an image he’s tried to conjure innumerable times: John’s weathered face looking down at him with fierce fondness and longing and something Sherlock can’t name yet, though it beats right through his blood. “You’re home now.”

He is. Home in the easy meeting of their mouths, as if they’ve been doing this since the day they met. Home in the cotton and spice that he’s sure will remain on his skin for days; home in the gentle rasp of John’s evening stubble against his. Home in the candlelight glinting off the beads of sweat that adorn John’s temples.

John chases rivulets of Sherlock’s own sweat with his tongue, down the length of his sternum, into the divot of his navel. Sherlock gasps at the look of bliss on his face.

He finds himself nodding when the beatific expression becomes a question, and then his belt is being slid through its loops, and his trousers are carefully—with notably steady hands—slipped past his narrow hips.

He doesn’t have time to stutter John’s name before he feels warm breath through the thin fabric of his pants.

John slides his hands up Sherlock’s thighs, making soft hairs stand on end. He drags his fingertips in patterns and kisses along Sherlock’s lower belly before pausing to inhale deeply.  
It ought to be humiliating, but Sherlock feels treasured; John is recording him, not like a scientist, but like a writer. The poet he is.

With a soft smirk and a bit of a groan, he props himself on his elbows and adjusts Sherlock until his thighs are resting on strong shoulders, his feet hooked over John’s back. Too slowly for Sherlock to panic, and distracted by a series of kisses along the ridge of a quadricep, he is divested of his last bit of clothing.

John looks up at him with a look part wonder and part propriety before taking him into his mouth.

“Ah. Ahh, oh, John—oh.”

It’s a bit sloppy, and there’s a hint of teeth, followed by an urgent apology that Sherlock can only respond to with an overwhelmed palm smoothed over John’s flushed nape. Gradually, urged by gentle hands in his hair, John finds a constant pressure. His small hands span Sherlock’s hips, stroking along his stomach before settling into a possessive hold on his upper thighs.

A lack of blood to Sherlock’s brain has wiped the static clean, and he is strung between a need to throw back his head in incredulous bliss and a need to etch every line of John’s face, softened by reverence, into the inside of his skull.

John wraps a hand around him, brow creased in concentration. The movements of his mouth have become more rhythmic and precise, and he’s begun to deploy little swirls of his tongue that have Sherlock holding back shouts and gripping the carpet.

Sherlock can feel it gathering in his belly, in his groin: the storm that’s been charged by every second they’ve both spend wanting this. He can’t allow it to come with John so far away, his beautiful face so serious, his thoughts so opaque.

He kicks gently against John’s back and tugs at his hair. “I need, I need—“

John lets him go and looks up with eyes like the darkest blue bit of a flame.

“What do you need? God, please tell me. Anything.”

“Closer. Up here. Please, John. Kiss me.”

“Of course. God, of course, always.”

He presses a last, lingering kiss to Sherlock’s knee before carefully lowering his legs to the ground and crawling up his body. On his way, he unbuckles his own trousers and shoves them down, along with his pants, so that they are evenly matched, without armor.

His lips are swollen and fervent when they finally meet Sherlock’s, and they reach for each other simultaneously. Arms wrap around shoulders and Sherlock’s heels dig into the small of John’s back. Nothing exists but the impossible heat and sheen of skin, so long untouched, against skin.

John kisses his lips, along his jaw, into the damp hollow of his throat. Sherlock sighs, eyes closed against brilliance of them, together, entwined on the carpet.

He shifts and feels John, stiff against his stomach. He reaches for him and drinks in the responding moan, his lips pressed taut against John’s jaw, then wraps a hand around them both at once. They shudder from the jolt of contact. He closes his fingers experimentally, careful not to hold on too tight, until he finds a rhythm that makes them both swear out loud. John leans toward him, eyes closed, and Sherlock kisses his mouth again and again until their breath comes too quickly; until they are breathing into each other’s lungs, gasping declarations that are repetitive but true, chanted like mantras.

It’s when John turns away, mouth open on a silent shout, that the storm inside Sherlock finally hits. He gasps and heaves and quakes and almost misses when John follows him, Sherlock’s name in his mouth.

They remain entangled for several moments, listening to the steady rain. The candles burn low and cast flickering light on John’s face. His features have taken on the look they do when he’s about to say something important, and for once, Sherlock doesn’t redirect with a joke or aside. Whatever it is, in the dark, in John’s arms, he is safe.

With a brief, ominous buzz, the room floods with light. It’s only from one lamp and the spillover from the kitchen, but it shocks Sherlock like lightning. He can’t breathe, suddenly; there isn’t enough oxygen in the heavy air. He jerks out of John’s arms and rises unsteadily. He gropes around the room for his dressing gown, painfully aware of the mess on his bare belly, and stumbles down the hall to the loo.

“Sherlock? Wait! What are you—“

He can hear John scrambling to his feet and struggling into his jeans, cursing his knee, and he slams the door shut, breathing heavily in the dark, hands braced against the sink. This should never have happened, never have been allowed. A countdown has begun, a sick descent to the point where John will sit him down and explain in his fragmented way the reasons why they can’t actually be together, why he will never move back into 221b, why this was a one off borne of emotion too long suppressed—

“Sherlock, I swear to God, if you don’t let me in—no. I’m sorry. Forget I said that. Like a threat.” He expels a shuddery sigh that makes Sherlock ache. “Please let me in. I have to tell you something. Please, I—I’ve got to.”

Sherlock presses his forehead to the mirror in front of him and squeezes his eyes shut.

“Please. I want to see your face when I say it. I have to know.”

After a series of shaky breaths, Sherlock nods once to himself. He opens the door and allows John into the dark bathroom.

“There you are.” John reaches out a hand, but stops himself. “Can I turn on the light?”

No, no, no, Sherlock wants to scream. He says nothing.

“I’m turning it on.” John flicks it on, and they both wince at the brightness.

“Right. I know you’re upset, and—and I want to know why, but let me. Let me just say this first. Just in case it’s what you need to hear.” He clears his throat, and Sherlock hunches with his arms folded across his chest. He is careful not to admire the lines of John’s bare chest, accentuated by the glow of heat and sex. “I. You know this already, I hope, but I’ve got to just put it out there. I love you. So fucking much, Sherlock. More than I know what to do with. How I’ve ever known how to handle. And if you’re thinking that this is a one off, or that one of us will do something to cock it up. . .don’t. I am here to stay. If you’ll have me.”

He looks up at Sherlock’s shock-taut face. “Will you?”

Sherlock spends what could be whole minutes staring and blinking, but John bears it with a straight back and his most set, certain look. He looks prepared to wait forever if he has to.

“I. So. You.”

“Mm. Yes. I love you.”

“Oh.”

“How could you ever doubt it?”

To Sherlock’s great alarm, John sinks to one knee for the second time tonight, wincing only slightly. “Sherlock Holmes. I should have asked you this the night I met you. I should have asked before you ever had the chance to leave me for two years. But here it is. Will you have me? Forever? As your—partner?”

Sherlock swallows, but it doesn’t keep his voice from cracking. “Can it be husband?”

“God, yes. Nothing would make me happier than to be your husband.”

Sherlock smiles, and only then does he taste the tears that have slipped down his cheeks. “Yes. Yes. Yes. Of course, yes, always, eternally, yes.”

John smiles, his eyes not dry either, and shakes his head in disbelief.

“Now get up off the floor, for God’s sake, before we end up in the A&E for a torn ligament.”

He reaches out and takes John’s hands, pulls him up, and tucks him under his chin. They sway together until John reaches behind him to turn off the light, and they spill into Sherlock’s bedroom and bed, embrace never breaking, to listen to the rest of the storm.


End file.
